Akimushkin whims of nature. Igor akimushkin whims of nature

On May 23, in the Central Children's Library for students of grade 3 "b" of MBOU secondary school No. 16, a game-journey "Nature is a miracle worker" was held.
Purpose: to introduce the work of I. Akimushkin; emphasize the style of the writer.
Tasks: to form cognitive interest among schoolchildren;
to develop creative activity, ingenuity, curiosity, horizons,
develop an interest in reading.
I. Akimushkin reveals to readers the magnificent world of animals and teaches them to perceive its diversity.
One of his first books, The Primates of the Sea (1963), will focus specifically on cephalopods- one of the most sentient beings among invertebrates. Igor Akimushkin is the author of 96 science fiction, popular science and children's works about animals.
For kids, Igor Ivanovich wrote a number of books, using techniques that are typical for fairy tales and travel. These are: “Once upon a time there was a squirrel”, “Once upon a time there was a beaver”, “Once upon a time there was a hedgehog”, “Animals-builders”, “Who flies without wings?”, “ different animals”,“ How does a rabbit not look like a hare ”, etc.
"The World of Animals" is the most famous work of Igor Ivanovich Akimushkin, which has withstood several reprints. They summarize a huge scientific material, a more modern classification scheme of the animal world is used, a lot of various facts about the life of animals, birds, fish, insects and reptiles, beautiful illustrations, photographs, funny stories and legends, incidents from the life and notes of an observer-naturalist.
For teenagers, Akimushkin wrote books of a more complex genre - encyclopedic: "Animals of the River and Sea", "Entertaining Biology", "The Disappeared World", "The Tragedy of Wild Animals" and others. from the first books on cryptozoology (the field of finding animals considered legendary or non-existent).
Without exaggeration, Igor Akimushkin can be called a worthy successor to the traditions of not only such well-known naturalist writers as M.M. Prishvin, G.M. Skrebitsky, V.V. Bianchi, B. Grzimek, D. Darrell, but also such a serious scientist who wrote the famous book "Animal Life" - A. Brema.
Akimushkin's work surprisingly combines Scientific research with captivating artistic narration, big love to animals with the interest of a research scientist, knowledge of the psychology and interests of children with the direct curiosity of a child.
The students were shown a slide show (according to Akimushkin's stories), a game was held that consisted of several contests: “guess riddles”, “animals”, “guess an animal by the description of its tail”, “an unseen animal”, “where, who lives? ".
The teams showed their erudition, ingenuity, imagination, artistic abilities.

Igor Akimushkin

Whims of nature

Artists E. Ratmirova, M. Sergeeva
Reviewer Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor V. E. Flint

Instead of a preface

A man at the dawn of his history built several buildings unusual for those times and arrogantly called them "seven wonders of the world." Neither more nor less - "light"! As if there is nothing in the Universe more amazing and magnificent than these buildings of his.

Years passed. Man-made miracles collapsed one after another, and all around… Great and wordless Nature raged around. She was silent, unable to tell the conceited man that the miracles she created were not seven or seventy-seven, but hundreds, thousands of times more. Nature seemed to be waiting for him to guess everything himself.

And Man, fortunately, understood this.

What, for example, are the Egyptian pyramids compared to the palaces built by African termites? The height of the pyramid of Cheops is 84 times the height of a person. And the vertical dimensions of termite mounds exceed the body length of their inhabitants by more than 600 times! That is, these structures are at least “more wonderful” than the only human miracle that has survived to this day!

There are, one might say, one and a half million species of animals and half a million species of plants on Earth. And each view is wonderful, amazing, amazing, amazing, stunning, marvelous, fantastic in its own way ... How many more epithets are needed to make it more convincing ?!

Every species without exception!

Imagine - two million miracles at once!

And it is not known what is more criminal - to burn the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus in the Herostratian way, or to nullify one or another view. The human miracle can be rebuilt. The destroyed miracle of Nature cannot be restored. And the biological species "reasonable man" is obliged to remember this and only then will it justify its species name.

However, enough assurances. In the book offered to the reader there is a lot of evidence of the wonderful uniqueness of all kinds of animals. In it, I tried to combine these uniquenesses, bring them together and connect them with zoogeographic regions - habitats of rare animals. He also spoke about that living and amazing thing, which, through the fault of man, is threatened with death.

And this amazing can manifest itself in different ways. Not only in the structure and behavior of the animal, but also in such, for example, aspects of the existence of a species as its endemicity, strange ecological niches occupied by it, correlations and convergences, special migrations, or, conversely, a rare attachment to a chosen habitat (as, for example, musk oxen), former and promising economic value(bison), amazing speed of running (cheetah) or interesting vicissitudes of discovery and study of the animal ( giant panda). In a word, by "unusual" I mean a wide range of issues related to the manifestations of life on Earth. It was with this in mind that the material for this book was chosen.

Of course, not all endangered animals are described by me (there are about a thousand of them!). For the same reason, not all the wonders of Nature are told: there are millions of them!

The fact that Nature is capable of arousing interest even among people who are far from her professions, I was once again convinced while working on the book. Having become acquainted with the manuscript, which has not yet been completed, my journalist friend Oleg Nazarov himself became so carried away that we have already written some chapters on unusual animals of South America and Australia together. For which I express my sincere gratitude to him.

Divided space

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ocean was at ease. Continents did not cut through its boundless expanses. The land in a single array towered above the salty waters. Scientists have named this as yet hypothetical supercontinent Pangea (or Megagea). In it, all modern continents were “soldered” into one common landway. This went on until the end Triassic period mesozoic era- until 200 million years ago. Then Pangea split, and the first to move south was Gondwana - a conglomerate of continents: Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America. Then Gondwana also broke up: South America rushed, separated from it, to the northwest, India and Africa - to the north, Antarctica, still connected with Australia - to the south. North America and Eurasia, which were not part of Gondwana, still constituted a single continent. Such was the position of the continents in the Paleocene - 65 million years ago.

Igor Akimushkin

Whims of nature

Artists E. Ratmirova, M. Sergeeva
Reviewer Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor V. E. Flint

Instead of a preface

And Man, fortunately, understood this.

Every species without exception!

Imagine - two million miracles at once!

And this amazing can manifest itself in different ways. Not only in the structure and behavior of the animal, but also in such, for example, aspects of the existence of a species as its endemicity, strange ecological niches occupied by it, correlations and convergences, special migrations, or, conversely, a rare attachment to a chosen habitat (as, for example, in musk oxen), past and future economic value (bison), amazing speed of running (cheetah), or interesting ups and downs of discovery and study of an animal (giant panda). In a word, by "unusual" I mean a wide range of issues related to the manifestations of life on Earth. It was with this in mind that the material for this book was chosen.

Of course, not all endangered animals are described by me (there are about a thousand of them!). For the same reason, not all the wonders of Nature are told: there are millions of them!

Divided space

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ocean was at ease. Continents did not cut through its boundless expanses. The land in a single array towered above the salty waters. Scientists have named this as yet hypothetical supercontinent Pangea (or Megagea). In it, all modern continents were “soldered” into one common landway. This continued until the end of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era - until the time of 200 million years ago. Then Pangea split, and the first to move south was Gondwana - a conglomerate of continents: Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America. Then Gondwana also broke up: South America rushed, separated from it, to the northwest, India and Africa - to the north, Antarctica, still connected with Australia - to the south. North America and Eurasia, which were not part of Gondwana, still constituted a single continent. Such was the position of the continents in the Paleocene - 65 million years ago.

Both Americas will move even more to the west, Africa and especially Australia - to the northeast, India - to the east. The position of Antarctica will remain unchanged.

“Continents don't stay still, they move. It is astonishing that such a movement was first proposed about 350 years ago and has been put forward several times since then, but this idea was accepted by scientists only after 1900. Most people believed that the rigidity of the crust precluded the movement of the continents. Now we all know it's not."

(Richard Foster Flint, Professor at Yale University, USA)

For the first time, the most substantiated evidence of continental drift appeared in the book The Origin of Continents and Oceans by the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener. The book was published in 1913 and went through five editions in the next twenty years. In it, A. Wegener outlined his now famous migration hypothesis, which later, significantly supplemented, also received the names of the theory of displacement, mobilism, continental drift and global plate tectonics.

There are few scientific hypotheses, about which there was so much dispute and which specialists of other sciences so often resorted to for help, trying to explain the unfortunate inconsistencies in their research. At first, geologists and geophysicists were almost unanimous in their opposition to Wegener. Now the picture is different: it has found recognition among many researchers. The main provisions of his hypothesis, modernized and supplemented, are used in the construction of the latest, more advanced geotectonic theories.

But justice requires to say that even today there are still scientists who confidently reject the possibility of migration of continents.

If we accept the position: Pangea is once a former reality, then we can draw the following conclusion, which follows from this fact: in those days, presumably, zoogeography would have been simple. For movement and distribution to all ends of a single landmass, animals did not know significant barriers. Seas and oceans, insurmountable for terrestrial creatures (not able to fly), did not separate the continents, as they do now.

And Man, fortunately, understood this.

Every species without exception!

Imagine - two million miracles at once!

And this amazing can manifest itself in different ways. Not only in the structure and behavior of the animal, but also in such, for example, aspects of the existence of a species as its endemicity, strange ecological niches occupied by it, correlations and convergences, special migrations, or, conversely, a rare attachment to a chosen habitat (as, for example, in musk oxen), past and future economic value (bison), amazing speed of running (cheetah), or interesting ups and downs of discovery and study of an animal (giant panda). In a word, by "unusual" I mean a wide range of issues related to the manifestations of life on Earth. It was with this in mind that the material for this book was chosen.

Of course, not all endangered animals are described by me (there are about a thousand of them!). For the same reason, not all the wonders of Nature are told: there are millions of them!

Divided space

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the ocean was at ease. Continents did not cut through its boundless expanses. The land in a single array towered above the salty waters. Scientists have named this as yet hypothetical supercontinent Pangea (or Megagea). In it, all modern continents were “soldered” into one common landway. This continued until the end of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era - until the time of 200 million years ago. Then Pangea split, and the first to move south was Gondwana - a conglomerate of continents: Antarctica, Australia, India, Africa and South America. Then Gondwana also broke up: South America rushed, separated from it, to the northwest, India and Africa - to the north, Antarctica, still connected with Australia - to the south. North America and Eurasia, which were not part of Gondwana, still constituted a single continent. Such was the position of the continents in the Paleocene - 65 million years ago.

Both Americas will move even more to the west, Africa and especially Australia - to the northeast, India - to the east. The position of Antarctica will remain unchanged.

(Richard Foster Flint, Professor at Yale University, USA)

There are few scientific hypotheses that have been so much debated and so often resorted to for help by specialists in other sciences, trying to explain the annoying inconsistencies in their research. At first, geologists and geophysicists were almost unanimous in their opposition to Wegener. Now the picture is different: it has found recognition among many researchers. The main provisions of his hypothesis, modernized and supplemented, are used in the construction of the latest, more advanced geotectonic theories.

But justice requires to say that even today there are still scientists who confidently reject the possibility of migration of continents.

Now Pangea has broken up into continents. And each of them bears its own faunal imprint. According to him, the entire space of the Earth is divided by scientists into different zoogeographic regions and kingdoms.

There are three of the latter: Notogeya, Neogea and Arctogea (or Megagea).

The distribution of vertebrates, mainly mammals, is the basis of this subdivision. Notogea is inhabited by oviparous and marsupials. Oviparous do not live in Neogea, but there are still many marsupials. The kingdom of Arctogeus covers such countries of the world in which there are no oviparous and marsupials, but only placental mammals.

In Notogea and Neogea, there is only one zoogeographic region each - Australian and Neotropical, respectively. There are four of them in Arktogey: Holarctic, Ethiopian, Indo-Malayan (or Eastern) and Antarctic.

The location of the latter is clear from the name.

The Holarctic region, on the other hand, occupies an area as vast as any other. It includes all North America, all of Europe, most Asia (south to India and Indochina), as well as North Africa to the borders of the Sahara with savannahs.